The Triumph of the Reich-Publican Party (William Norman Grigg) "There’s nothing American about what just happened," protested Nevada Republican delegate Wiselot Rouzard after the convention refused to seat the delegation from Maine. "This is the death of the Republican Party."

What Wiselot and fellow Ron Paul delegates had experienced was a memorable display of the Republican Party’s fetid essence. The tactics employed by the GOP establishment to isolate, intimidate, and ultimately to expel Ron Paul delegates were the natural product of the party’s totalitarian genetics. By using criminal means to impose a monolithic, top-down process in which an entrenched oligarchy can re-write the rules to suit its whims, the Republican Party was simply living down to its odious pedigree.

From its inception, the Republican Party has been devoted to a doctrine properly called national socialism – the fusion of politically favored corporate interests with national bank and an all-powerful, militaristic central government. This is why Dr. Paul’s noble attempt to cultivate a liberty movement within the GOP was ultimately as futile as seeking to create life in a test tube.

As Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo documents in his slender but potent volume Lincoln Unmasked, a century and a half before the lamentable advent of Barack Obama "The Party of Lincoln set out to fundamentally transform the American government from a decentralized confederacy of sovereign states to a consolidated, monolithic empire." The mission of the GOP, in a single phrase, was to supplant the republic with a reich.

The party’s objectives were described with admirable clarity by Ohio Senator John Sherman – brother to the infamous mass murderer Gen. William T. Sherman, who after putting Atlanta to the torch pursued an exterminationist "final solution" to the problem of the Plains Indians on behalf of the corporatist railroad combine. The Republican Party, Sherman proclaimed, sought "to nationalize as much as possible, even the currency, so as to make men love their country before their states. All private interests of individuals, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals – everything – should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government."

Mussolini would later digest that formula into a single pithy prescription: Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

Dr. Paul and the movement he inspired have agitated for an end to everything the Republican Party cherishes – central banking, fiat money, centralization of power in the executive, militarism, crony capitalism, government regimentation of private life in the name of "morality." Thus it’s hardly a surprise that the RNC and its epigones treated the Ron Paul delegates with the same cultish hostility displayed by Landru’s followers toward those who were "not of the Body."

Witness the fact that objections by Paul delegates on the convention floor were shouted down by mouth-breathing party cadres chanting "USA! USA! USA!" (A more appropriate refrain, given the Party’s emphasis on unity uber alles, would have been: "Ein volk, ein reich, ein fuhrer!") Also of note were the Soviet-style methods used to suppress even the audible mention of Ron Paul’s name during the convention’s roll call.

"It’s a totalitarian process," lamented Yelena Vorobyov, a disillusioned 30-year-old Ron Paul delegate from Minnesota, referring to revised party rules – enacted by a patently fraudulent voice vote after key potential dissidents had been detained or effectively abducted – that stripped all power from state parties. What the RNC accomplished in Tampa is best captured in another German expression – Gleichschaltung, the "coordination" of all activities under the control of the party’s central committee.

What happened in Tampa was a relatively genteel version of the undisguised Brownshirt-style thuggery that had been employed by Party operatives during the primaries. Witness what took place during Louisiana’s state GOP convention on June 2, where Henry Herford – the convention’s duly elected chairman – was feloniously assaulted by a thugscrum of four Shreveport Police Officers, who acted on the orders of the Quisling faction within the state Party.

Herford was hospitalized for a dislocated prosthetic hip. In keeping with standard procedure, the uniformed assailants filed spurious charges against the victim.

"They arrested me for … resisting arrest, and they never said I was under arrest," Hereford commented after being released from the hospital. "And [they said] I didn’t leave when they told me to leave – but I never was told to leave."

Herford, who underwent a CAT scan on his hip and received a painkiller injection, didn’t sign his arrest papers.

"I can’t sign anything while I’m on a narcotic, and I told the police that," he explained.

Alex Helwig, a Ron Paul delegate and Chairman of the Rules Committee, made a formal motion to remove the chair. In a fashion reminiscent of a third world dictatorship, Helwig was seized by Shreveport Police and removed from the room. During his brief detention, Helwig suffered several broken fingers – a punishment favored by Mussolini’s Blackshirts – and when he returned to the event he walked with the aid of a cane.

In their valuable book Red Republicans and Lincoln's Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War, Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson, Jr. examine the role played by the "48ers" – veterans of the 18 interconnected revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848-1849 – in creating the Republican Party, bringing Abraham Lincoln to power, and conducting the war against the South.

Lincoln, who would later slaughter hundreds of thousands of Americans in order to create a unitary national government, offered unqualified support to the proto-Marxist revolution of 1848. "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better," he insisted in a January 12, 1848 speech. "Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."

The "48ers," note Kennedy and Benson, sought to overthrow the existing political order and then consolidate power over larger territories. They weren’t secessionists who sought merely to withdraw from an unsuitable political arrangement, as was the case with the American South.

The revolutions of 1848 understandably appealed to the idealistic impulses of people weary of absolutism. But, as Kennedy and Benson observe, this proved to be a familiar bait-and-switch, with those "freed from local decentralized control" were made subject to "centralized authoritarian control" in the name of Democracy.

The revolutionaries applauded by Lincoln lusted to reconstruct society through violence. In Germany, the stated objective of the revolution was to fuse a multitude of independent principalities into "a united indivisible republic." Again, this foreshadowed the work of Abraham Lincoln and the party that elevated him to power.

When the revolt of 1848-49 was crushed, the "48er" diaspora brought many of the most ambitious and radical of the revolutionaries to the United States, where many of them were instrumental in creating the Republican Party. Several of them – such as Joseph Wedemeyer, Charles A. Dana, Franz Sigel, August Willich, and Carl Schurz – played prominent roles in the war to conquer the independent South. Dana, a personal friend of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, was assistant secretary of war under Lincoln.

The slogan-spewing herd poisoners who compose the GOP’s media auxiliary routinely depict Barack Obama as the embodiment of an ideology alien to America’s constitutional origins. If such people were burdened with a particle of intellectual honesty, they would recognize that to the extent this depiction of Obama is reliable, he is Lincoln’s true heir.
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William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.